Here's an idea. I haven't tried it yet, but it may give a good starting point:

Set up your camera outside on a tripod and lock it off. Take a few seconds of footage during the day with the apprpriate aperture, exposure, gain settings. Then wait for it to get dark. Take a few more seconds of footage with new aperture/exposure/gain. Get stills of each and try to make the day shot look like the night shot.

Notes: The night shot will likely be grainy, due to the increased gain needed in the camera, but it should still give a good reference.

If anyone does this, let me know how it goes. I may try it soon myself.

Thanks for all the feedback, guys. There's nothing better about writing a tutorial than hearing that people are using it. Thanks!!!!

I've been using MSP myself lately, ('cause it was free and I can't afford to upgrade my old Premiere.) but I'd love to update the graphics in this tutorial with screens from a current version of Premiere.

If anyone can get the matching screen shots in an up-to-date Premiere, please, contact me via eMail or PM (you would get credit in the updated tutorial, of course).

One thing that just came to my mind. Apart from letting the overall scene appear in a blue tint, shouldnÂ´t the overall saturation be decreased? When being outside and itÂ´s very dark, for example not in a city but in a more wilderness settting (which is quite often used in SW fan films) it appears that you barely can make out which color certain things have. Due to the lack of light reflecting, they eye doesnÂ´t get enough information which parts of the light things reflect. So I would suggest not only turning things blue but also lowering the saturation. I think just giving things a blue tint looks somewhat fake to my eye. When IÂ´m out at night I donÂ´t have the feeling that everything turned blue but into gray shades. What do you guys think?

Decrease the saturation a bit. I learned when I was doing astronomy that the human eye detects green and blue much better in the dark, and overall color sensitivity is decreased (because the rod cells are used rather than the cone cells). That's why when you look at a nebula, it's greenish blue, but when you take photographs (with LONG exposure), it's reddish.

I'm thinking that the shadows have to be darkened as well. What I've tried doing is making a new layer with the Threshold filter applied, so that there is white and black areas depending on luminosity. Then gaussian blur it and then use Multiply as the transfer mode. It looks OK on stills (I'm trying to tweak it), but I don't know about live action. Maybe the blur softens everything too much. I like the darkened shadow effect. Any ideas on how to do it better? Darkening the shadows without darkening the highlights (so you can still see what's going on).